Villanelle: Mornings; Darkness Visible

Mornings

My wife wants coffee. I get up. It’s cold.
I plug the coffee maker in and wait.
I don’t need mornings to know that I'm old.

My joints no longer do as they are told.
The smell of coffee tells me I’m awake.
My wife wants coffee. I get up. It’s cold.

A little sugar and it’s good as gold.
I’m a cold fish and coffee is the bait.
I don’t need mornings to know that I'm old.

We never listened to what we were told,
How age would change us, age would desiccate.
My wife wants coffee. I get up. It’s cold.

It’s pain and wisdom that will be unscrolled.
One feeds the other as we dissipate.
I don’t need mornings to know that I'm old.

This lifelong sentence will never be paroled.
Come join me, we can have a grim parade!
My wife wants coffee. I get up. It’s cold.
I don’t need mornings to know that I'm old.


It was 47 degrees in the house when Kenyon woke me at 7:30 this morning for his constitutional. I don’t mind the cold so much but I noticed it was colder than it had been. Later I rose and made coffee, the subject of today’s villanelle, and turned the heat on up to a blistering 57 for Kathleen. She complains that it is not only cold but damp here, and it is. I tell her that’s the price of living in the coastal redwoods.

My mood seems to be holding at neutral, thanks be to God and medications, and it’s so strange waking to myself. As my older brother likes to say when I come out of one of these down cycles, “Welcome back.” There is a villanelle by Roethke I love called “The Waking,” for any interested. Next to “Do not go gentle” by Thomas I think it’s the best villanelle in the language.

While depressed there was nothing beneath my solar plexus, just a vacuum or a cardboard imitation of feeling like a person. Now beneath my sternum is a feeling of Craig—-I can love again, appreciate natural beauty, caress my dear wife, make jokes, have ambitions, work without a sense of hopelessness, in a word, live rather than barely exist. In my humble opinion as a manic-depressive, the feeling of self is much overrated, as are all the positive emotions. In deep depressions there is a complete loss of self and no memory of how it feels to be oneself. Those who have not gone through this cannot understand. I always recommend William Styron’s Darkness Visible to any who are interested in the illness. He is more eloquent than I. When you come back to yourself after a depression, truly, it seems a miracle.

Rodent Neutral,

Craig Erick